A convolutional neural network with a two-stage LSTM model for tool presence detection in laparoscopic videos

Abstract

Surgical tool presence detection in laparoscopic videos is a challenging problem that plays a critical role in developing context-aware systems in operating rooms (ORs). In this work, we propose a deep learning-based approach for detecting surgical tools in laparoscopic images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) in combination with two long short-term memory (LSTM) models. A pre-trained CNN model was trained to learn visual features from images. Then, LSTM was employed to include temporal information through a video clip of neighbour frames. Finally, the second LSTM was utilized to model temporal dependencies across the whole surgical video. Experimental evaluation has been conducted with the Cholec80 dataset to validate our approach. Results show that the most notable improvement is achieved after employing the two-stage LSTM model, and the proposed approach achieved better or similar performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.